Humility: Staying True To Myself

I was only reminded about my blog a few days ago by a good friend that I had just added to  my Google circles. He said he liked what he read there. I was surprised that someone actually read what I wrote. Just like my tweets, I don't really expect anyone to read my blog posts. I used the word 'expect' intentionally there, because without expectations, there's no disappointments.You can't blame a brother for watching out for himself, disappointments are no fun. I lasted blogged more than two months ago. Not expecting anyone to read my stuff helps to be as open as possible, hence the name Conversations With Myself ( I'm sure Mandela wouldn't mind). This is a space where I can be just 'me' as I put my stuff on paper ( blogging is writing, remember).

The feedback I've been getting has been very positive and encouraging. It's also scary at the same time, I was also reluctant about writing another posts. The reason for being reluctant was that I didn't know how people will receive my future posts. I think that's normal though, we always wanna do better than the last time. I felt like I've raised expectations and I didn't know how I could live up to them any more ( self-inflicted,  right?). I was thinking about ways on how I can stay relevant to the people that have read my blog. Those were the things that were on my mind as I replied to a fellow comments on my previous posts. I believe them when they say we create our own demons, unnecessarily.

It's only now that I realised that I missed the point. Going back to basics is one thing I do in my life whenever I feel like I'm at the crossroads, that's when I ask myself why I started what I'm busy with  at first place. I started this blog to create my own space where I can simply express myself. Having people to read and comment is a plus. This was a moment in which phrases like 'get your priorities right' became so vital. I was being unfair to myself and people around me. I was paying too much attention to people's expectations that I forgot my simple mission: to  be just me and nothing more. I was going against the same 'values' that led to the establishment of the blog. I felt so bad as I thought about it later.

I believe I have nothing to prove to anyone. I don't need to please anyone at my own peril. I've seen celebrities losing themselves as they are striving to be what the public expects them to be. I've seen preachers compromising the truth for the fear of public judgement. I'm not willing to bear a burden of what people say about or how they see my blogposts.  Mine is to stay true to myself. My greatest joy will come from knowing that people love what I write because it is genuine and honest, not from how many views and comments I get. I've seen what Facebookers do to get 'em likes, and how they lose their originality in the way. Not that I want to be Public Enemy Number 1. I just don't want to get false comfort from knowing how people love my work, because that was not the main goal.

Back to compliments again, they are good and we all need them ( I still wonder why the Bill Of Rights doesn't include them). They are also bad though, especially for someone like me who easily gets ahead of himself. They can make me feel very arrogant, and feel I've achieved something while I have not. They make me complacent and that's why I never do well in my 2nd tests and final exams, if I did well in the first test. You know, like the cheers from the fans in the stands making you think that you've won the race?. What if I'm not as good as I think about I am?. Who will I be when  the cheering stop?.

One basic formula for happiness in life is to know who to please. In this case, I have only three people to please, and it's just me, myself and I. If I please anyone else along the way or  someone can relate, that's a bonus and it's much appreciated. I will try to stay humble and put no pressure on myself. There's no pressure in being myself, as that's the best person I can be.

L.O.V.E: Matters Of The Heart

We can be best friends until you ask me about love. I've never been  comfortable with talking about my love life, or lack thereof. I do not usually fall in love but when I actually do, I fall so hard that I even hurt myself. I have never been in a relationship though, despite my numerous attempts to be  in one. Maybe it's the sadness  of my love stories that makes  me reluctant to talk about  love. If I can be given a chance to ask God a question, it will be why He lets us fall in love with love who may never love us back. Why do we have to go through all the trouble and still get nothing in turn.

The process of  falling in love is amazing. You meet someone, you like them( I believe in love at first sight, yeah), you want to know more about them, you fall in love with everything about them. If it's really deep, you even start thinking about building the future with them. It's all good, as all fantasies are. You build up the courage to tell them how you feel about them ( an act of bravery, if you ask me). When you finally tell them how you feel about them, that's when the castle you built in the air comes crushing down( story of my life). Expectation meets reality. You failed to read between the lines. It's just discouraging to know that falling in love with someone isn't enough to  get them into a relationship with you. There's nothing as heartbreaking as knowing that you've done your best  but your best wasn't good enough. You don't mean to them what they mean to you. How sad!

It's one of those things that makes me  question why the  world turned out to be so unfair, especially for good boys like me.You never know the struggle of being a good boy unless you are one, every girl loves you but 'not in that way'. Then, if you are a believer like I am, you will find comfort in believing that God has someone  better for you. Anyway, that's what all the girls I've fallen in love wish for me. 'I therefore wish that God blesses you with a great girlfriend', wrote one of them. Is there any girl 'greater' than you?. Am I supposed to find consolation in that?. What is good about being a 'good boy' then?. Maybe I should have a 'bad boy' side, isn't that what girls want?. How can I continue to believe that I'm a 'good boy' if I'm not what they want?. Not knowing what's wrong with me makes it harder for me to find ways to improve my approach going forward.

It was in Economics that I was taught about the concept of double coincidence of wants. It simply says that, in the absence of money, I should have something that you want if I want something from you. Applied in the complex theory of love, in order for a relationship to exist, I must be the man that she wants as much as she's the woman that I want. But then how would I know that she wants me?. At some point, I told myself that I will never fall in love again unless I'm 100% sure that the girl  I'm falling in love with  loves me back. I realised that it was too unrealistic. I've accepted that there will always be an  element of risk attached when I profess love to any girl. The price is too high, because even the friendship you had before will not be the same. I don't even wanna talk about the emotional downtime you will always go through. I never saw myself as an emotional being until I suffered rejection, it just broke me in a way that nothing in life made sense. It sucks being a human sometimes, having limitations to the heights you can reach and not getting what you value so much. It was a learning experience though, it generally taught how I have to respond to situations in which things don't go my way. Love-wise, it taught me that girls don't like it when we boys sulk.

They say love knows no boundaries and all that kinda stuff. I'm starting to question those notations. After having to deal with three rejections, maybe there's something wrong with the people I fall in love with. They are out of my league. I'm just not their 'type'. The last thing I want, even in life in general, to be delusional. I want to face reality as it is and accept it for what it is. Maybe love life is this one sphere of my life in which I need to apply that. You can relax, I'm not tapping out of this love game( no, it's too emotional to be a game). As I know how it feels to be in love with someone, I still want to know how it feels to be loved back.

Despite the fact that I've never been in a relationship, I strongly believe in love. Seeing someone for who they are and loving them in presence of their obvious flaws is just...inexplainable. Everyone deserves some happiness in their lives and relationships are supposed to be a place where people can find that. The hope that someone one day will give her life to me and I give mine to her is what keeps me going. I guess it's only with love that life becomes worth living. I still don't believe that love is overrated. It is its mysterious nature that intrigues me the most.

I don't regret not having been in a relationship before, for I believe the relationships I'll be in will be worth the wait. Hope I'm not once again building castle in the air. I hope I won't find myself singing Nelly' 'Just A Dream'  again. I will appreciate the one I will be with for I know that it's not always that one gets who they want. I will love, love and love again. To love is to live.

Fitting In: Survival Of The Coolest

A question that I asked myself after few weeks in UCT was whether I was in the right place or not. I had great grades( just like anyone here) but I could feel that the life here would need something more than that. I could feel that the space was suffocating me, I couldn't breathe. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was going through( I read the UCT Prospectus every night in my matric year), I was just all alone in this big world. I had to be strong and be a big boy( big boys don't cry).

I was made to believe that education is all that mattered. Not that I come from an educated family. I was never good in anything that my peers engaged in, be it soccer, music( Venrap is big in my 'hood), girls, marble games etc. I am not the most streetwise person you'll ever meet. The only thing I was good in was academics. Initially I was not exceptionally good but just because it was the only thing I focused my energy on, I ended up being one of the best learners to have ever come out of the schools I went to. That was good and it put me in the best university on the Continent. Yeah I said it was good but it was not enough. The life in  UCT needed much more than what the textbooks had taught me, it needed someone who had developed wholistically. In high school and before that, I could hide behind my books and shy away from the world. Teachers' and parents' compliments made me believe I was something I was really not( it took UCT to burst the bubble). It is not like it is a bad thing to focus on one's schoolwork. It only becomes problematic where it hinders one from living the life now, thinking that they are preparing for the future that they will never be ready for.

The experience of difficulty with adapting to a university environment is this one thing that one cannot understand unless they have gone through it firsthand. Being the first one( hopefully I won't be the last) from my family to have gone to university, it means that my family could not understand what I was going through. It's very good to have as many people as possible being proud of you and believing in you but if what they think about you isn't really how you see yourself, it just becomes this heavy burden on one's shoulders. You cannot be honest with those kind of people even when the going gets tough, they know you as someone who can always pull through and you want to be that person to them. I now have a problem with expectations, for it's only without them that we won't have disappointments. They have played a huge role in the decisions I had made in the past, and in so doing I've let other people live their lives through me. It is only when you are sure of what you want that you do not conform to the expectations, you follow your heart though that can lead you to a road less traveled.

Turns out that Accounting is not the only thing I had to learn. Nothing was familiar to me. Conversations would now have to be in English, laundry would have to be with a washing machine, now I will have to do some shopping on my own, I would have to make new friends etc. I had to learn to manage my life, not just my schoolwork as I used to. For anything to happen in my life, I had to make it happen. This is supposed to be fun for most people but not for me, I love comfort zones and I stay in them for as long as I can. This means that I take long to adjust to a change in my life and this one was overwhelmingly big. Fortunately I was placed in a catering residence hall, so I didn't have to cook( I still haven't learnt how to cook). In the meantime, I am supposed to keep up with my schoolwork and to do well( that had been my life story). You can only imagine how I felt when I found out that I wasn't doing as well as I've always expected myself to. It is never a pleasant feeling when you see that everything in your life is out of control, when you try to fix this, that is getting worse on the other side. It's in situations like those that you start to cry out like Jesus 'Eloi eloi lama sabachthani', with heavy burdens on your shoulders and no one to help you cope.

Even with platforms like social media, people do not talk and they suffer in silence. We always want the world to see the best of us in these platforms, that way they can like us( pun intended). I just wanted someone to tell me that I wasn't the only one feeling lost, I wanted them to tell me that it's a normal passing phase. Just that the environment in UCT is too individualistic, in a way that everyone has locked themselves in a corner and deal with their issues on their own. This is a very different setting to the one I grew up in, where people live in communities and share their burdens.

In all these, I learnt to love myself unconditionally. That's radical self-love, as some call it. I learnt to love and accept myself for who I am before I expect the world to do the same. They say if you face the world with a smile(  don't fake it), it smiles back at you. You cannot expect to get from the world what you cannot give yourself. I learnt that there's nothing inherently wrong with me, maybe there was just something wrong with my approach to life. There was no need to fit in, or to try to. If there are people who are meant to be in my life, it would eventually end up there without me having to change who I am. I never had to be hard on myself, because that way I turned a blind eye to my good qualities and focused on those things I couldn't immediately obtain.

Loving myself didn't mean that I didn't have to see my mistakes, I just meant that I was able to see myself beyond those mistakes. Loving myself meant that I can be better than what I was. It was only after that I even fear the potential that I have, I learnt that I didn't have to try to hard, that I can take it easy and just be smart in everything I do. As I continue to love myself and appreciate those I have in my life, I hope reach greater heights than I have ever imagined. By being myself, I not only do favour to myself, but also to the world with which I interact.

"Accepting myself for who I really am is the best favour I have done for myself, it makes me be at peace with reality"- Khangwelo Matodzi